INTERVIEW: Gabrielle Aplin on new single and video 'Call Me': "I wanted it to feel very human and have a physical space"
Interview: Jett Tattersall
British singer-songwriter Gabrielle Aplin recently launched a new era in her music with the single and video ‘Call Me’.
An uplifting, anthemic track it combines Aplin’s signature piano focused pop with a hypnotic synth beat and soaring vocals. There is a thread of melancholy weaving through the song as Aplin looks back with a regret on a broken relationship: “I wish I went out / I wish I called you back / I wish I had a hold of my issues / But I just wrote a song about how much I miss you,” she sings.
“In the various lockdowns I found myself wishing I’d done things and hadn’t done things when I had the chance,” Aplin says of the inspiration behind the song. “Big things and small things. I wish I’d gone on that random night out, I wish I hadn’t said that mean thing, I wish I called that person back, I wish I had sat out and enjoyed the sun. It’s like, if only I could go back in time and experience these things when I had the chance to. It’s as if I didn’t have the memories and experiences, I thought I’d need to get me through the extended solitude of early 2021. It’s kinda like, if you change your mind, I’ve changed my mind too so call me.”
The music video, directed by Jamie Thraves (Radiohead, Coldplay), subverts the theme of the song and sees Aplin meet with an accident while talking on her phone. Seemingly unscathed, she runs off to make the most of what’s left of the night. “For this video I wanted to create something a little odd and gritty, and most importantly something that was fun to shoot,” she says. “We initially wanted to make a horror movie, but ‘Call Me’ needed something cinematic and musical, but it was important to me that it still had grit. So we decided to treat it as a weird little night time musical, as if it was a section of a big film, more than a pop video. It was such a wonderful experience running through the streets of Bristol singing my song to a city that I love! It was such a joy to make.”
With over a billion streams to her name since her first hit in 2012,, Aplin has been one of the most successful singers to emerge from the UK in the past 10 years. Embracing a new creative process and outlook on life since she relocated to Somerset in late 2020, she is creating some of the best music of her career and has more to come in 2022 with a full body of work to arrive soon . We recently caught up with Aplin to find out more.
Hi Gabrielle, so lovely to chat to you again. How are things with you?
Really well, thanks. Busy, but in a good way. I feel like I've spent the last year and a bit making an album and making stuff and it got to the point where I finished everything and just wanted to start putting it out. So it's nice to have stuff out and be working on something, you know? I like to be working to be working, I don't like having nothing to do to be honest.
Let's talk to you about your beautiful new single ‘Call Me’, I want to say it's a driving track. It's a closing credits track, a rewind and replay track. Can you talk to me about everything about this song?
I wrote it in lockdown, the third lockdown we had here, which was the winter of last year. Whilst I wrote all the songs in lockdown, I didn't want it to be a lockdown record. I wanted it to feel very human and have a physical space, but the writing was very insular, very introverted. It was the first time as well that I had made an album without being told how to make an album. I moved back to the south west where I'm from, and it was much more quiet than when I lived in the south east. There was literally nothing, which was a novelty for about a week and then it wore off! At the start of the pandemic, I just released my third album (Dear Happy) and by the time the lockdown came, I actually had nothing to do. Everything that I thought made me who I was was stripped away. Touring and in person interviews and putting my makeup on and my clothes and just all the superficial things. With that kind of isolation, I started writing songs again, just because I had to. Not because I told to go a writing session or I was told that now's the release time, you better start making something, it was completely intuitive. It's very much about there were so many opportunities [pre-pandemic] and I feel like a lot of us were living life like we just had infinite time and it doesn't matter, I won't go out and see my friend that day, I can do that another time or I'm not gonna go and do that thing, I can do that another time. I just kept passing on things and realising that I had a lot of regret for all the things I didn't do. I didn't collect enough memories to sustain me through that time.
I wasn't thinking about radio or what trends sonically were happening around that time, I just wrote. It was very floaty, and then I took it to Mike Spencer who produced it, and he had a really good point that everything just felt a bit all over the place. His words were ‘it needs to go on rails’. He put that synth in and suddenly, it all made sense and I was like, ‘Oh, this is it!’. That's when it started getting really exciting for me in terms of how the visuals were going to happen, I wanted everything to mean something, every aspect of it. My studio is amazing, it's running itself on renewable energy and I just thought, how cool would it be if all the visuals were made by some sort of natural power? We made the cyanotypes that were printed by the sun and I really felt like an artist.
When you starting out in the industry with English Rain you were suddenly on everyone's radar. And as amazing as that must be, there must be a lot of going along with what everyone says. Now at this point of your career, you understand exactly what you want, and at the same time, you're relaxed enough in that to still reach out and ask without the fear of it being taken away from you.
Definitely. The interesting about English Rain is whilst I was working with big, major labels, and they were brilliant, a lot of the songs I'd written before I'd even been signed. So it feels a lot like that again, except without the huge corporate input. I was just writing because I write songs, it’s what I do, regardless of what my job is and that's kind of what it feels like now. The stuff that came after English Rain was maybe more of a success than some people thought it would be and that put a lot of pressure on what was to come after. It feels very similar to English Rain except this time I was able to redo all the things that I thought worked and, and not do all the things that I thought didn't work, you know. One of the reasons that it did work was because the labels just left to me and Mike, there wasn't really much A&R input. It feels very free, I feel very in control. It's really nice.
You have teamed up with some incredible people ‘Losing Me’ with JP Cooper ‘Miss You 2’ with Nina Nesbitt. What is it about creating a track with a completely new artist or person that you like and, personally do you ever find it intimidating leading up to it?
No, not really, Sometimes things can be quite lonely, promoting a song or an artwork, or a video or whatever, my face is literally the face of it. So it's really nice to share that sometimes. Nina and JP they know exactly what it's like and what's going on, so sometimes it's just nice to have a friend to do something with. I actually really enjoy collaborating, I love it.
Your first album English Rain you have that beautiful folk pop sound, and then you experimented with indie rock, and now we’re hearing that alt pop sound while still saying very true to your voice. Reflecting back on your earliest songs, would you say that there was a ‘portal song’ that opened you up to the kind of music you're creating now?
Oh, that's a good question! For me, it was more about going back to being a songwriter, and then dressing the songs how they're to be dressed. When I was writing English Rain, for example, I was either a piano or a guitar, I was writing my songs and the production didn't matter as such. And then when I was making Dear Happy I wanted to just get around a bit, I wanted to travel, it wasn't all made in the same place with the same person. With English Rain, I was able to play the songs on my own solo after I'd written them, because they were just written in that way and that's kind of what I wanted to do this time, I wanted to just write songs on my own, be able to play them on my own as a solo artist, and once I've got that, nothing else really matters.
With the production now, I really wanted it to be very human and I wanted it to have influence of all my favourite things, there's a lot of retro influence, but I wanted it to be a modern record. When we were able to and the restrictions lifted, we went to a studio in Bath called Real World and we spent a week there just tracking a band and playing live, basically collecting all of this data to then take back to my Mike’s and then resample, rerun and cut up and use. Everything still had a physical space, even with extra bits that I was playing on a synth or whatever, we run’d it through a speaker and record that in a room so everything had a physical space. Those were the pillars we brought in and then as long as we kept that structure and that formula when we were doing everything, what came out of it was just what the production was going to be.
You yourself are a vegan and you have promoted and have, also tuned your craft in support of some really incredible human rights activism as well. Artists today have become our point of reference with regards to social opinions, I don't imagine you got into the music career to also get into politics but it‘s something you have to bear. How important is that platform that you have to raise awareness about the issues that inspire or enrage you?
It’s really important. I's a really interesting time as well, within the internet and social media. It's highlighted that there's always something going on anywhere, there's multiple awful things happening in this awful world right now. I don't think it's fair to assume, and expect, everybody with a platform to be across everything because we're going to spread ourselves too thin. But it's important that if you care about something to do whatever you can to spread awareness, to give your time. There's this amazing sense of joy you get from helping towards something you care about as well, it's really inspiring. For me, I really care about climate injustice, I care about refugees, and what's happened to them, and particularly what my country is doing to them. I care about various things, and there are things that I care about, but I don't know enough to speak about. I do worry that sometimes things can become performative to the point where people will just post something to tick a box and then be like, I've done it, and then that becomes more important to them than the actual thing itself. If you do know about something, enough to be able to share that information, I don't see why you wouldn't, if you do care about. It's just so easy.
Beautiful. You had some very creative years when the world was locking down, but since its opening up again, you've been singing in some beautiful, beautiful locations and stages. How has that been returning to a live audience?
Oh, it's been really amazing. It's been weird, it was going into a bit of a time warp, especially because I was on tour when the first lockdown started and I got sent home and we only just finished those shows in March. It had been exactly two years but it felt like nothing had changed and we're just back on the bus exactly where we got sent home from as well. It was bizarre! But you kind of just fall back into it, there’s this weird muscle memory. It felt a lot more chilled, but also felt so grateful to be there as well and be doing it. It just felt amazing. You can see how much it means to people as well. I've been back to a few gigs and stuff too and I'm like, ‘this is amazing!’ It's just wonderful. It's expressive for me as an artist, but it's also expressive for fans and people who want to see live music too. You just forget how much people are getting out of it. Before the pandemic, there was no real rule on anything, everyone's like ‘you're doing this, you've doing this show’, and you just end up saying yes to everything to the point where you go on autopilot and you turn up and you sing and you to go to the next one. [The pandemic] just made us so aware of everything and how much of a privilege it is to be able to do that, and how much it means to be people as well.
Gorgeous. And beautiful track to be back with honestly, ‘Call Me’ It's so gorgeous. Lastly, before I leave you what's coming up for you?
I just made a huge collection of songs ‘Call Me’ is the first one. I guess if it was traditional, it would be an album but what's really exciting about music and especially as an independent artist, it's amazing to see all the different and really creative ways in which you can release an album or a body of work. There is a body of work coming, I don't know how and which format I'm going to release it, but it's really exciting to be exploring that right now.
‘Call Me’ is out now Never Fade Records/AWAL. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Gabrielle Aplin you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
